Modern day diets and unhealthy lifestyles are often blamed for furred arteries which result in heart disease.
But studies of an ancients skeleton had found that the problem has been affecting human health for a least 3,000 years.
Ancient African skeletons have been discovered with atherosclerosis, a thickening of the artery wall due to fatty build-up and a major factor in cardiovascular disease – the leading cause of death today.
Doctors blame our modern lifestyle with smoking, obesity and hypertension commonly the cause.
But the condition was also prevalent 3,000 years ago among the simple farming communities who worked the land by the Nile in what is now Sudan.
Matches up with this piece of research that came out last week:
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/03/strong-link-between-obesity-and-carb-breakdown-gene
Do skeletons have arteries?
3000 years not really ancient, though … agriculture, wheat, high blood sugar and pro-inflammatory plant proteins – surprise surprise: bad teeth and inflammatory disease. meh.
Cheesburger, please … hold the bun!
Agree with TT, I suffer from gout which is aggravated by foods high in purines so have to watch my intake of greens. I have found that fruit such as mango and pineapple can trigger the gout.
“Doctors blame our modern lifestyle with smoking, obesity and hypertension commonly the cause.”
The rise and fall of heart attack rates predates modern levels of obesity. Nasty condition, smoking, I’ll grant you that. Hypertension: yeah, but the evidence base for the preferred thresholds is, I gather, very weak.
Atherosclerosis is normal. I recall one of the more useless pieces of misdirection to come out of the Dr. Kelly autopsy was that he had atherosclerosis. Would have been a bloody huge surprise if a 60 year-old mad didn’t have atherosclerosis.
Do cheeseburgers and tabs increase the prevalence, decrease the age of onset, and increase the incidence of coronary infarctions to which that atherosclerosis is a necessary precursor? Unquestionably yes. That an otherwise fit and healthy African farmer had it 3000 years ago doesn’t change this.
@Interested, without being a forensic anthropologist, the characteristic calcified thickenings of the coronary artery wall are probably only slightly less resistant to decomposition than bones. Even if the soft bits get all eaten up by worms.
Could coronary heart disease caused by disease of the coronary arteries actually be an epidemic?
At least one doctor thinks so.
And if he’s right, maybe the guy in Somalia lived at a time when the epidemic was in full spate, unlike now when it is in decline
“smoking, obesity and hypertension commonly the cause” do we know for sure that tobacco was not around then . Salty food likewise..